dinner is served

It is a Tuesday night. I just made one of the strangest dinners I think I have ever eaten. I consisted of leftover salad that I put in a pan and FRIED, yes FRIED along with some frozen vegetables and chopped bits of shish kebab that my South African math teacher friend brought the other night when people came over to eat at my place. I didn’t make meatloaf and scalloped potatoes for them - just too hard. I made rigatoni, which we used to call “sewer pipes” when I was growing up (quite a disgusting name for a dish when I think about it) and a big salad. But people came with all kinds of their own dishes, since it seems that every meal turns into a potluck, and I have been eating leftovers every night since. Anyhow, tonight’s dinner of fried salad was a real shot in the dark. Hey, I cooked the hell out of it, salted it up, and it all tasted like a big shish-kebab stir-fry. However, I don’t think I’ll enter it in the Betty Crocker cooking contest.

So… here we are, it’s almost November. I looked at the Yahoo weather today and saw that it was 98 degrees in Kuwait. But it actually feels quite cool. The hot water heater is turned on, and there is a less miserable look about the trees and plants that people keep alive with trickling garden hoses. The mornings and evenings are dark. I still haven’t seen a drop of rain since coming to Kuwait, but I’m told there will be an occasional sprinkle come winter time. Supposedly it rains mud because of the sand and dust in the air, so it doesn’t sound particularly pleasant, but I suppose the desert weeds are happy with it. I still haven’t worn any of the long-sleeve shirts I brought with me. I am one of the dandiest dressers of the school, by the way, sticking to my neckties as a kind of trademark.

I am heavy into the juggling act of teaching and school work. I stay at work till 5:00, making for 10½ hour days. Behavior problems are nearly daily occurrences now. So-and-so throws a chunk of eraser at whats-his-name, and he misses and hits the other guy, who goes ballistic and attacks So-and-so. Before I came there was a big controversy over a vice-principal who was barred from leaving the country pending a court case over her decision to give a kid an in-school suspension. The powerful father said that she had put his son in jail. There was even an effort to get teachers to boycott their contracts in Kuwait, and a few teachers actually left. It’s because of something called “wasta” which means “top-down pressure.” People who have a lot of power and influence can basically do as they please and you’d better not get in their way. So discipline here is very touchy. You basically discipline as long as the parents go along with it, but if they object, you say “ok, no detention, never mind, have a nice day.”

Today I had my first encounter with a mother who wore full black cover. Most of the mothers don’t wear that, so I was caught off guard. I forgot that you’re not supposed to offer your hand to these conservative Islamic women. The first thing I did was smile and stick out my hand. She put up her hand in a gesture of STOP, and it just went downhill from there. Goodness gracious, was she full of anger and spite! I decided that since she didn’t want to be seen, I was not going to look at her eyes, so I looked at my desktop for the entire conversation. The conversation itself was surreal - it was about her son being exposed to bad behavior and comments by another student. She actually spoke good English, but her voice was shrill and quivering. She was scary! Whew, I was glad when she left. I will not look at the boy the same way again.

My Arabic teacher has the idea that Americans have mistaken ideas about Islam just because of 9-11. All the terrorism, he explains, is coming from bad Muslims who don’t listen to the Prophet. He thinks that American media is controlled by the Bush government to intentionally keep Americans from knowing that most Muslims are really nice people. I told him that I thought the call to prayer was too noisy and the women in black cover were scary. He and his son had a good laugh when I said these things.

Next week there’s going to be a lecture at the AWARE (Advocates for Western-Arab Relations) Center given by the Archbishop of the Holy See in the Vatican on the topic of Muslim-Christian Dialogue. I might go, or, since it’s a Thursday night and that’s fun night for teachers, maybe I’ll skip it to play games and drink special fruit-juice punch and eat snacks with my friends. I did go to mass again, and I have to say that it was 100% better. It was Mission Sunday, and the priest talked about “Mission Moment” and finding God and purpose in the Now -- pretty sophisticated and deep stuff for any Catholic church. The excellent homily made up for the fact that the Indian Catholics practically trample each other bustling and pushing to get to the Eucharist - it’s actually comical and horrifying to see how they act like they’re starving for communion. I blocked one man who tried to butt in front of me in line. I was going to tackle him and pin him to the ground to make him wait his turn. I don’t think that’s what Jesus had in mind at the last supper. When I think of how absurd people act out of religious intentions, it just makes me laugh.

By the way, if you remember from my previous entry, I got to know a taxi driver from Bangladesh named Mohammed who starts every sentence with “this is.” I was with another teacher friend getting groceries. There is a huge grocery store that’s right in the middle of a super high-class shopping mall, and all the people who buy groceries park in the underground parking and pay someone to push their grocery carts down there and load up their cars. We called Mohammed who had agreed to pick us up, and told him to come and get us. Would you believe the guy said he was too busy with his flower shop, he couldn’t come. We ended up pushing our carts through the mall and getting ride home in junky taxi with no AC that sounded like it was going to break down any minute. The next time we saw Mohammed, he said, “Sir, this is I wait for you long time at shopping mall, this is, why you never call back?” As a matter of fact, the teacher friend who had been with me that day was in the cab. We looked at each other mutually confused. “Mohammed, I said, we DID call you, and you told us you were too busy with your flower shop.” Then Mohammed said, “Sir, what are you talking this? I am taxi driver only I don’t have flower shop!” I took out the business card of flower shop Mohammed and said, “Isn’t this you?“ Would you believe it? It turned out, that there are TWO Mohammeds, both Bangladeshi taxi drivers of similar size, accent, and voice. One has a flower shop and one doesn’t. I don’t know how we ended up with two of them. We thought they were the same Mohammed. So flower-shop Mohammed had probably gotten a call out of the blue saying, “OK we’re ready, come and get us right now. Please park in the underground parking.” No wonder he said he was busy.

There are some pigeons living in the window-well outside the bathroom window. I want to feed them, but there is a fan installed in the bathroom window and you can’t open it. For a long time I couldn’t figure out what the noise was - it sounded like an overworked washing machine or some kind of squeegy or something. It was the pigeons roosting in there. I know I shouldn’t feed them because then there will probably be a hundred of them. But I sort of want to feed them. Any thing that survives here deserves a little help.